2010 Whitney Biennial Installation Shots

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:05:45 -0500

As part of 2010, the Whitney commissioned Jeffrey Inaba’s INABA and C-Lab to design a temporary café for the Lower Gallery of the museum. The café design includes a variety of elements: light fixtures, a bar, tables, table tops, and seat cushions, all of different sizes, shapes, and synthetic materials. Operated by restaurateur Danny Meyer’s Hudson Yards Catering, it features sandwiches commissioned from the chefs at Union Square Café (Carmen Quagliata), Gramercy Tavern (Michael Anthony), Tabla (Floyd Cardoz), Eleven Madison Park (Daniel Humm), Blue Smoke (Kenny Callaghan), and Hudson Yards (Robb Garceau), available exclusively at the Whitney only during this installation.

See New York Magazine’s Grub Street

Volume 20 on Storytelling at the Architectural Association, London

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:00:11 -0500

Come by for the roundtable discussion on Storytelling marking the 20th issue of Volume Magazine. In the past two year numerous dramas have competed for our attention: housing crisis, banking meltdown, pandemic, recession. The all-consuming effort to follow these events seldom leaves time to contemplate the explanations themselves. Volume 20 is dedicated to the art of Storytelling. It presents the story lines of current events to show that while the truth is important, so is the ability of fiction to elevate fact. Perhaps the best way to eventually understand our era and to create architecture itself is through narratives that distort, pervert and animate reality? During challenging times, when it appears impossible to chart a path out of the forest of uncertainty, maybe fantasy can help to build a precise and concrete story for architecture's future.

http://volumeproject.org/blog/2009/07/29/volume-20/

Participants
Tom McCarthy, Writer, General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society and Author of Remainder
Dave McKean, Illustrator, Artist, Filmmaker
Mark Wigley, Dean, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, Volume Magazine Founding Editor
Brett Steele, Director, Architectural Association
Jeffrey Inaba, Director, C-Lab, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, Volume Magazine Features Editor

Architectural Association School of Architecture 36 Bedford Square London WC1B 3ES +44 (0)20 7887 4000

Book Launch for Jeffrey Inaba and C-Lab's 'World of Giving' at the New Museum

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:30:52 -0500

In place of the pursuit of personal wealth, World of Giving presents a mindset revolving around generosity. It paints a picture in which giving animates all types of human interaction, acknowledging that each and every one of us gives. From helping out an acquaintance to donating to a valued cause, we all provide in acts big and small that benefit people beyond the immediate recipient. In this important exploration of the sentiments of our time, the authors describe the basic motivations for why we give with examples including local volunteering, philanthropy and the flow of aid through foundations, governments, multinationals and NGOs. The book details the process of working toward a greater good and shows that a gift transforms at numerous junctures as it circulates through the complex world in which we live. Articulating these intricate relationships, World of Giving offers an understanding of the actions that build bridges between goodwill and need, intention and realization.

World of Giving is by Jeffrey Inaba and C-Lab in collaboration with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, the New Museum and Lars Müller Publishers.

To celebrate the book’s release, join us for the party Thursday, November 12th from 630-830p with Richard Flood, Jeffrey Inaba, Lars Müller and Mark Wigley.

Richard Flood, Chief Curator, New Museum
Jeffrey Inaba, author of World of Giving and Director of C-Lab
Lars Müller, Founder, Lars Müller Publishers
Mark Wigley, Dean, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

Music by Jamison Guest

RSVP: dthiem@newmuseum.org

New Museum
235 Bowery
New York, NY 10002
212 219-1222
Map

Volume 20 on Storytelling Edited by Jeffrey Inaba

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 19:00:00 -0400

Storytelling communicates facts, but it also builds upon real-life accounts to enrich public expectations and elevate beliefs. To these ends, it is worthwhile to get reacquainted with the children’s story. Although regarded as a vehicle to escape reality, the children’s story, and in particular the fairy tale, could again help to elucidate larger social and political storylines. This issue of Volume responds to the global crisis, continuing a series of inquiries started in Volume 9, Urban China 31, Urban China Bootlegged by C-Lab and Volume 19. Here, we present storytelling as a means of understanding our time and constructing a narrative of response.
Crisis creates confusion. It is a situation in which all avenues of recourse fail. Actions taken to remedy catastrophe have little tangible consequence. There is no discernable correlation between cause and effect, and as a result disorientation arises. In some cases the environment may continue to look the same, yet because its behavior can’t be grasped there is a perplexing disconnect. A crisis is when space can’t be explained.
After the immediate shockwaves, when the unpredictable events ebb and the climate regulates, there is much that is left to be explained. Gathering information and forming it into descriptions is the first step towards regaining bearings. Narratives explain space.
Stories are important to architects because they form the foundation of architectural proposals. It is through these episodes that a project’s general challenges and constraints are outlined and an architectural strategy and formal outcome are determined. For this reason, we need to know how tales are told. Journalism experts Nicholas Lemann and Jay Rosen lend a helping hand by discussing the particular challenges of writing stories about our precarious times. Lemann notes the inherent contradiction involved in analyzing facts and constructing a coherent narrative, while Rosen describes data collection resources and our social obligation to explain. Both encourage us to engage stories with indulgence and scrutiny. They offer practical suggestions for crafting timely stories while remaining skeptical of received reporting and conscious of actions an account may provoke from its readers.
Storytelling could involve writing a new public script about space. In addition to the classic narrative elements that Gustav Freytag observes on page four – including the statement of a problem, an exposition of its context and a proposal of resolution – such a script could make probable complications known through disclosure and qualification. As interest in new infrastructure grows and as cases for its realization take shape, now is a good time to create a planning narrative that borrows lessons from earlier, problematic propositions made in the name of technological advancement and urbanization. With the help of Christopher A. Scott, Stephanie von Stein and Jiang Jun, C-Lab breaks down general claims made for the implementation of large-scale technology.
In professional contexts there is little incentive to disclose a project’s cons along with the pros. Instead, there is almost an expectation that a proposal makes unqualified positive claims. In ‘The Technostrich’ and ‘The Technology Narrative’, we contend that it would not be so bad to make the potential problems of new technologies publicly known. It may behoove proponents to come clean and to build trust by divulging technology’s limitations. Moreover, it would be opportune to write a script that avoids grandiose promises and instead solicits experts to help solve problems that may arise along the way. The disclosure of possible complications, conflicts and the particulars of the decision-making process may in fact contribute to a project’s realization rather than its demise.
In the following pages, C-Lab shows the ability of the children’s story to make sense of hard-to-describe events, given that its format addresses emotionally difficult, morally complicated and ethically charged issues with concision. We argue that such constructions are especially relevant today since simple public narratives set the tone for actions in response to the very events (like crisis) which challenge our ability to distinguish fact from fiction.
While truthfulness has it value, the same can be said for fantasy. The children’s story is well suited to counteract the resignation and incapacitation that often accompanies trauma, since its fantastical plots aim to summon the imaginative potential of the reader’s captive mental state. Rather than try to discern reality from fantasy, contributors like Lewis H. Lapham, Neil Denari, Catherine Hardwicke, Dave McKean, Tom McCarthy, Smiljan Radic, Lucia Allais and Roger Dean would encourage us to cycle between conscious and unconscious states, work-life and dream-time, desire and disappointment, material reality and history because to do so is essential to an enhanced experience of the physical environment. For good reason, people say a story isn’t worth telling if it can’t be told to a child. A simple, distilled story that clarifies the crisis, and that aids the formulation of policies to better understand and animate the physical environment, is definitely worth telling.
See Regine Debatty’s review at We Make Money Not Art
Purchase Volume 20!

Urban Pavilion in Jeju, Korea

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:00:03 -0400

INABA has been selected along with 9 other international firms to design a pavilion in Jeju, Korea.